After just a 10-minute interview with a psychiatrist, Dr. Victoria Aramian's 11-year-old son was sent home with a prescription for the powerful antipsychotic Haldol. Five days into being on the drug, her son started saying he was hearing voices and that his head hurt. When she took him back to the psychiatrist complaining of the side effects, they just added another antipsychotic drug. When she took him to another doctor, they just upped the dose. This continued for some time, with her son experiencing more and more debilitating side effects. Dr. Aramian had grown up with the ideas of natural medicine and natural remedies and had become an educated person and fell into the idea that medicines would help her son.  When she toured CCHR's Industry of Death Museum, she realized how wrong she was and now wants to tell the world about this experience in order to prevent anyone else from going through a similar one. Dr. Aramian is this week's guest.

Whether under the auspices of Child Protective Services, Departments of Family and Child Services, or Youth Welfare Offices, foster care children—often removed from family homes because of abuse—are furthered abused when they are prescribed psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs under state care. In fact, US foster children receive at least three times more psychotropic drugs than comparable children in poor families. Already troubled over their circumstances, these children are drugged for emotional and behavioral issues, sometimes with tragic outcome.  This week's guest, Sonya Muhammad, has been fighting this system from within and is ensuring that foster children receive standard educational solutions, not psychiatric drugs.

In 2007, it was reported that up to 80% of children diagnosed with Autism were prescribed at least one psychiatric drug.  These drugs include antipsychotics, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety drugs, which have been documented to cause aggression, hostility, suicidal behavior, emotional numbness, insomnia, and many others.  There are many different theories about the best course of treatment for autism.  There are natural treatments for autism, including herbal and homeopathic remedies that can help maintain health and systemic balance, without the side effects of psychiatric drugs.  This week's guest is Joni Cox from The Autism File – a quarterly magazine dealing with all aspects of autism.  She discusses natural ways to help families with children diagnosed with autism using diet and nutrition.

Psychiatry would prefer to say or imply that only brain-based, mental "illnesses" can affect irrational behavior or thinking, that they need long-term, if not life-long care, and that they are incurable. These falsehoods have been so successfully disseminated throughout the mental health system and amongst the public, that countless numbers have become trapped as lifelong patients of psychiatric and psychological services. People are being misdiagnosed—and harmed—to an astonishing degree. Many of them do not have psychiatric problems but exhibit physical symptoms that may mimic mental conditions, and so they are misdiagnosed, put on drugs, put in institutions, and sent into a limbo from which they may never return. This week's guest is Barry Lieberman, a chiropractor who is helping people find the underlying physical conditions and returning them to optimal health.

Psychiatrists say that mental problems are incurable and that the afflicted are condemned to lifelong suffering—on psychotropic drugs. Though psychiatry may have given up on mental healing, this is fortunately false. Mental problems can be resolved, and thankfully so. Imagine how it would be to believe if man was destined never to overcome his personal obstacles, never to arrive at an understanding of himself and life. This week's guest is Lyle Murphy, founder of the Alternative to Meds Center in Arizona. He will discuss the multiple ways his center is helping people achieve true mental health through alternative methods.

There are alternatives to psychiatry's unworkable and dangerous methods. Mental healing treatments should be gauged on how they improve and strengthen individuals, their responsibility and their spiritual well-being.  This week's guest is Dr. Michael Farley, who has been helping people naturally for 29 years.

Psychiatric drugs do not cure anything.  They are simply toxic chemicals that can mask a real medical condition – a condition that could be treated with non-drug methods - if one were to look for the actual causes.  Naturopathic doctor James Chappell explains that psychiatric drugs are prescribed for behavioral symptoms that are caused by such simple-to-handle conditions as dehydration, nutritional imbalance and exposure to toxic substances, to name a few.  Psychiatrists treat symptoms, not causes, with drugs whose side effects are usually interpreted by the psychiatrist as new psychiatric symptoms, necessitating yet another psychiatric drug.  Dr. Chappell's information on actual causes and how to treat them will help you avoid a potentially life-threatening ride on the psychiatric merry-go-round in today's 39-minute show.

Psychiatric programs and drugs have ravaged our inner cities, helping to make criminals of our young people. This week's guest is Gerard E. Thompson, executive director of Pathways To Your Future. He has seen first hand the devastation psychiatric drugs are causing and is working to reverse this decline.

The suicide rate among military veterans has been growing and growing in recent years:  In 2008, the Army's suicide rate exceeded the civilian suicide rate for the first time.  It is not a coincidence that Dept. of Defense statistics show that between 2005-2008, there was a 400% increase in prescription of antidepressants and other drugs used to treat anxiety.  This week's guest, Dr. Paul Harch, Director of the Hyperbaric Medicine Dept., Louisiana State University School of Medicine, New Orleans, recently testified before Congress on this epidemic. He showed the connection of the drugs causing suicides and provided an alternative for these veterans who are returning from war—Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy.  This is the medical use of oxygen at an increased pressure, which has therapeutic value.  Dr. Harch showed how preliminary application of this therapy to our brain injured veterans has returned nearly 80% of these veterans to work, duty or school with a life-time savings to the government of $2.6 million dollars for each active duty member returned to duty, and $2 million for each injured service member returned to work or school.

Children's mental health is, for the vast majority of children, a matter of being loved and cared for and protected from harm and provided with an environment in which they can thrive. This is primarily the job of parents.  However, on occasion, society does have to protect children from their parents. This puts social agencies in the place of a parent.  Whereas, this should be considered a sacred trust, in child welfare agencies, it is too often the case that this parental responsibility is relegated to psychiatry and child welfare workers become the enforcers of psychiatric drug administration. The use of dangerous, mind-altering psychotropic medication by children and youth within the child welfare system is rampant.  This week's show discusses the dangers of these drugs and alternative therapies for foster parents to utilize in handling behavior issues, that don't use psychotropic medications.